Hayloft Evenings

Bailey dragged the last barn door shut on the evening wind and stood there a minute with her palm flat on the wood. Her shoulders ached from hauling water. There was dust in her braid, dust in her boots, dust probably in her teeth, and all she could think about was a shower and maybe a sandwich if Monika had left anything in the fridge besides mustard.

That was when she heard footsteps in the shavings behind her.

"You look like someone who lost a fight with the pasture," Monika said.

Bailey turned around. Monika was leaning against the stall gate with her hat pushed back and that grin she got, the one that usually meant trouble of the fun kind. She was thirty, five years out in Nevada from her family's farm in Montana, and Bailey had never once gotten tired of looking at her. Two years now. Two years since the rodeo, since the beer tent, since Monika had bought her a lemonade and told her she had a laugh worth following around.

"I feel like it too," Bailey said. "Don't let the smell fool you, I'm charming underneath."

"Oh, I know exactly what's under there!" Monika pushed off the gate and came closer. "Been thinking about it all day, matter of fact."

"Been thinking about what?"

"You."

Bailey laughed. "I'm covered in horse."

"That's not stopping me." Monika reached out and tugged gently on the end of Bailey's braid. "Bailey. Hey. Look at me!"

Bailey looked. The barn was down to lantern light, one lamp hanging off the hook by the door, and the last bit of red sun coming through the gap over the doors. Monika's face was half gold and half shadow and it was not fair at all, what that did to her.

"I've been thinking about you since about seven this morning," Monika said. "You came out of the bunkhouse in that flannel with your sleeves rolled up and I nearly dropped my coffee. I've been useless ever since. Dropped a saddle. Reyes asked me if I was sick."

"You dropped a saddle?"

"Don't get hung up on the details. Point is, everyone's gone up to the house, the ranch is quiet, and I have a proposal."

Bailey wiped her hands on her jeans even though it changed nothing. "I'm listening."

"Upstairs." Monika tilted her head back toward the ladder to the hayloft.

"The loft." Bailey glanced up at it. "It's full of hay. And it's full of, I want to say, at least four different kinds of animal hair."

"It is. And there's a blanket up there I put there this afternoon, and there's a lantern, and there's nobody on this property with a reason to come looking for either of us for hours." Monika's voice had gone lower, softer. "I'm tired of the tack room, baby. I'm tired of six minute kisses with one ear open listening for boots. I want an evening. A whole one. With you, up in that hay, where nobody can find us."

Bailey felt her tiredness change shape. It didn't leave, exactly. It just got rearranged into something warmer lower down.

"That does sound better than a sandwich," she admitted.

"You were going to have a sandwich?"

"I was going to have a sandwich, yes, and you have just talked me out of it, I hope you know what you're asking."

"I know exactly what I'm asking." Monika took her hand. "Come on. Before I lose my nerve, because I rehearsed that speech four times today and it still came out crooked."

"It was a good speech."

"Thank you. I worked on it."

Monika went up the ladder first, which Bailey figured was either politeness or a plan, and knowing Monika it was both. Bailey climbed after her, and by the third rung the whole smell of the barn changed, hay and warm wood and the sweetness that collects up top where the sun has been pressing on the roof all day. The lantern was already up there, turned low, sitting on a flattened bale like Monika had built her a little stage. There was a quilt spread over the hay. An actual quilt, with patterns on it.

"You brought a quilt up here this afternoon," Bailey said. "While I was mending fence."

"I did."

"You planned this."

"Since seven this morning, I told you." Monika sat down on the quilt and pulled her boots off, one and then the other, unhurried, like they had all night. Which, Bailey realized, they actually did. "Sit down. You're letting the cold in."

Bailey sat. The hay underneath gave a little, and the quilt smelled like the line where it had dried, and the lantern made a small orange world just big enough for the two of them. Through the gap under the roof edge she could see the first stars coming out over the pastures.

"Okay," she said. "This is already better than my whole day."

"Good. Because it's about to get better than your whole month." Monika turned toward her, cross legged, and reached over to pick the dust out of Bailey's braid with her fingers. "First, housekeeping. Chores are done. Payroll stuff, feed invoices, all of it, I finished it at lunch, don't ask me how. So there's nothing hanging over either of us. Nothing to feel guilty about, nothing waiting."

"You did the invoices?"

"I did the invoices. Focus, Bailey."

"I'm focused. It's just, you did the invoices, that's basically a love letter in this economy."

Monika laughed, that low laugh that Bailey could feel through the hay. "Second thing. You know I'd never push you anywhere you don't want to go. So this whole thing is a question, the whole time. You say stop, we stop. You say not tonight, we go eat sandwiches and that's fine too."

"I know that."

"I know you know it. I'm saying it anyway because I want to hear you say it back, because I like hearing it."

"Okay, yes," Bailey said. "It's a question the whole way. Stop means stop." She reached out and put her hand flat on Monika's knee, over the denim, warm from the day. "And right now my answer to the first question is yes."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Come here."

Monika came. She moved up on her knees and took Bailey's face in both hands, thumbs along her jaw, and kissed her slow, nothing like the tack room at all. No ear open. No counting minutes. Bailey made a small sound into it and felt Monika smile against her mouth.

"There she is," Monika murmured. "There's the girl from the beer tent."

"She's been here the whole time. She's just been really busy mending fence."

"Mm. Tell me about your day. No, actually, don't, I don't care. Tell me with your shirt off."

Bailey laughed so hard she had to put her forehead down on Monika's shoulder. "You cannot just say things like that."

"Why not? It worked, didn't it?" Monika was already working at the first button, patient, waiting to see if Bailey would stop her, and Bailey did not stop her, she just lifted her chin like a queen and let her.

"Careful," Bailey said, "I'm filthy."

"You're beautiful. Filthy and beautiful. The combination I signed up for."

The flannel came off her shoulders and the loft air hit her skin, cool where the sweat had dried, and then Monika's hands were warm over it, and Bailey stopped having opinions about anything except those hands. Monika kissed her collarbone. Kissed the hollow of her throat. Took her time. Two years of quick stolen kisses had taught Bailey that Monika, given room, was the most patient woman alive, and it had been so long since she'd been given room.

"Monika," she said, and it came out rough.

"Mm?"

"Less talking from me, I guess, is what I'm saying."

"That's fine. I'll carry the conversation." Monika eased her back onto the quilt, hay poking here and there in a way Bailey decided she did not mind, and settled half over her, propped on one elbow. The lantern put her face in gold. "You good? Still a yes?"

"Still a yes. Very much still a yes."

"Good." Monika kissed her again, deeper this time, and her hand slid slow down Bailey's side to her hip and rested there, asking. Bailey pushed up into it.

"God," Bailey breathed, "you really did plan the whole thing."

"Told you. I had ways of occupying my mind today." Her fingers found the hem of Bailey's shirt and slipped under it, just resting on bare skin, warm palm flat on her stomach. "Tell me if you want more."

"I want more."

"Then come here, baby. We've got all night."

Outside, the crescent moon was climbing over the barn roof, and down in the pastures the horses were quiet, and nobody on the whole ranch knew where the two of them were. That was exactly how Monika had wanted it.

Bailey sat up too, pulling Monika with her, and they ended up kneeling face to face on the loose hay, the quilt half shoved aside, neither of them caring. The lantern threw their shadows big against the barn wall, and somewhere below them an old board creaked as the barn cooled.

"Hi," Bailey said, because her brain had gone mostly to static.

"Hi yourself." Monika's hands came up and framed her face again, and this time Bailey did the same, palms on Monika's cheeks, feeling the day's stubble of heat there, the small roughness where her jaw worked.

Bailey kissed her slow. Slower than slow. The kind of kiss she'd been rationing for two years in doorways and tack rooms, always with one ear open for boots on gravel. Now there was nothing to listen for except the horses shifting below and Monika breathing through her nose against her mouth. Their hands started to wander almost on their own, up under shirts, over ribs, learning skin that both of them had only ever gotten in scraps before.

"Okay, wait," Monika said, pulling back an inch. "Hold still. I've been wanting to do this since roughly seven o'clock this morning."

"What, kiss me? Because we checked that box in June, I think."

"No. This!" And quick as anything, because she'd spent five years around horses and knew exactly how to move a body that outweighed her, Monika took both of Bailey's wrists and pressed them back above her head into the hay, pinned there under one hand, easy, nothing cruel in it at all.

Bailey's breath went somewhere south of her boots. "Oh."

"Oh," Monika agreed, grinning down at her, lantern gold all over her face. "See, here's my problem. You're always so competent. You fix fence, you haul water, you tell Reyes his estimate on the hay is crooked, you're on top of everything all day long. And I have been dying, dying, to be the one place you don't run the show."

"That's a lot of pressure on one hayloft."

"It's a very sturdy barn." Monika leaned down and kissed the corner of her jaw, then her ear. "So. Is this okay? Be honest, baby. I can let go the second you say so."

Bailey tested the hold without meaning to, just a small flex of her arms, and the hand didn't budge, and that did something to her insides that she was not going to describe out loud for money. "It's okay," she said. "It's more than okay. Keep going."

"Keep going what? Use words, I'm a simple ranch hand."

"Keep going, Monika, oh my god."

"There she is." Monika kissed her again, deep and unhurried, still holding her wrists, and Bailey arched up into it and let her whole body say the rest. When Monika finally released her wrists it was only to sit back on her heels and grab the hem of her own shirt.

"Fair's fair," she said. "You got a head start."

"Rude of me, honestly."

"Terrible manners." The shirt went over her head and landed somewhere in the hay, and the lantern light moved across her like water. Montana farm girl shoulders, five Nevada summers of sun, a thin white scar near her ribs from a colt with opinions. Bailey had kissed that scar a hundred times and still thought it was maybe her favorite part of the woman.

"Come on, yours too," Monika said, and Bailey obliged, and then they were both working at boots and jeans, laughing a little, because getting undressed in a hayloft involved a certain amount of wrestling. Monika kicked one boot off and it tumbled down through the floorboards with a bang that made them both freeze and listen. Nothing. Nobody home for hours.

"We're fine," Monika whispered.

"We're fine," Bailey agreed, and then they were down to nothing but skin and the quilt, and the cool air met sweat-warm skin and every place they touched felt loud. The lantern turned them both gold at the edges. Bailey was aware of being dusty still in places she'd missed washing, and was aware of not caring even slightly.

Monika put her hand flat on Bailey's collarbone and left it there a moment, like she was reading something.

"What?" Bailey asked.

"Nothing. Just looking at you. I stood in the aisle this morning like an idiot with my hand on my chest." Her fingers started to move, tracing down, slow, over the ridge of Bailey's collarbone, down the middle of her chest, following the line of her breastbone. "When Reyes asked if I was sick, I told him allergies."

"You are sick."

"Thank you, baby, I love you too." Down over Bailey's ribs, and Bailey's stomach jumped under the touch, and Monika paused there with her whole palm spread on the soft curve of Bailey's belly, fingers spread wide, like she was claiming territory.

"Ticklish?" she asked.

"On my stomach, yes. Viciously."

"Noted for later." But she didn't tickle. She just kept her hand there, warm and heavy, and looked at Bailey with an expression that had gone from teasing to something quieter, and that shift did more to Bailey than everything before it combined.

"Hey," Bailey said. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere. Right here. I'm just having a moment, let me have it." Monika's thumb moved in a small circle. "Two years